How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F.A. Cup

Description

How England's most obscure local team, who felt lucky when their home pitch was above water-level, went all the way to Wembley 'But is this story believable? Ah, it all depends upon whether you want it to believe it.' J.L. Carr Very strange and extremely funny, this uncategorizable novel is a surreal fantasy set, vaguely, in the early 1970s, during one highly memorable football season. Steeple Sinderby Wanderers, in their new all-buttercup-yellow stripe, start it by ravaging the Fenland League and end it with a phenomenal nail-biter against Glasgow Rangers. Told through unreliable recollection, florid local newspaper coverage and bizarre committee minutes, How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F.A. Cup is somehow both entertaining and very moving. There will never be players again like Alex Slingsby, Sid 'the Shooting Star' Swift and the immortal milkman-turned-goalkeeper Monkey Tonks.

James Lloyd Carr, born 1912, attended the village school at Carlton Miniott in the North Riding and Castleford Secondary School. He died in Northamptonshire in 1994. His novel A Month in the Country won the Guardian Fiction Prize, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and made into a memorable film.

It's a comic story about sportsmanship and underdogs; it's also a slightly wistful portrait of village life and provincial decency, as well as a beautifully written hymn to doggedness and eccentricity. This gently humorous novella is the anti-Ronaldo. -- Robbie Millen * The Times * An extraordinary performance, simultaneously one of the greatest football novels ever written and a penetrating report card from a world where fiction rarely lingers, at once a comic masterpiece and a study in national temperament that the doughtiest social historian would struggle to match. -- DJ Taylor * Guardian *